


Miles To Go Before We Sleep

by Whisperslip



Category: Zombieland
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 21:50:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whisperslip/pseuds/Whisperslip
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I feel I must apologize to my Yuletide recipient. I am fail at teh humorz, and in my attempts to weave comedy into what was essentially a tale of angst, I somehow scribbled out this 4,000 word monstrosity. I also appear to be incapable of writing in lengthy paragraphs. However, Merry Christmas, and I hope you enjoy it for what it was worth.</p></blockquote>





	Miles To Go Before We Sleep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KarmasChild](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KarmasChild/gifts).



Silence.

The lights of Pacific Playland twinkling disconsolately in the distance, a wordless plea for someone, anyone, to come back and play, to fill it once again with the frenetic sound and motion of laughter and carriages arcing through the air.  Darkly, idly, Columbus spinning bleak fantasies of the tinkling fairground music spooling eerily over the ruined city, splintering into a rambling, fractured silence with the passage of the years.

In the backseat, Wichita stirs uneasily. Her fingers twitch, convulsively, clutching the hem of her sister’s jacket as she makes a small, almost inaudible sound or protest.

“Hey,Tallahassee.”  (Someday he will reach back and kiss her forehead, brush her hair over her ear.) “ Tallahassee. Hey. ”

“Huh? That’s my name, bitch, don’t wear it out.”

“Talluh..Talluh..ha..ssee..” Syllables staggering, drunken and clumsy, off of his tongue. The adrenaline from the night’s near-brushes with death—the fear, the danger, ohgawdthe_kiss--_ is already beginning to ebb, supplanted by a drowsy, nebulous warmth that seems to swell out of his chest and snarl insistently around his thoughts. Even his own voice feels distant, trailing uncertainly out of the darkness. “When we met.  You said you were going to Tallahassee. Why? What’s there for you?”

No answer, and for a moment Columbus wonders if he’d even spoken aloud.  The other man merely  continues to watch the highway disappearing beneath their wheels, one hand steadying the dashboard as the Escalade hungrily devours the miles between themselves and the border.  Columbus closes and eyes and swallows thickly, pressing his face against the cool glass of the window as he thinks of the scent of her hair (cinnamon), her face sticky with a residue of tears. Her lips mouthing a soundless ‘thank you’ into his chest.

Tallahasee stirs, rubbing his jaw in a gesture of tired resignation.

Abruptly: “No, no reason.”

“What?” Krysta. She said her name was Krysta.

“There wasn’t a reason.” The other man rolls his shoulders, a gesture of  deliberate nonchalance. “I stopped at a Circle K the week…the week after they took Buck. Bashed in the face of what used to be the clerk, nuked me some corndogs, spread open a map on the counter. Closed mah eyes and pointed. Tallahassee, Flo-ree-da. Nothin’ more than chance and a grease stain. “

A spread of dials and gauges gleam on the dashboard, counting down the gallons, the revolutions, the miles until their destination. Columbus watches, mesmerized, the splotches of oily light sliding across the surface of Tallahassee’s snakeskin jacket and thinks about home. He wonders what he had hoped to find there. He wonders what would have happened if he had found his parents how he had left them, his mother stockpiling Ovaltine in the bedroom, his father eager to tell him all about how the zombie apocalypse was just the first stage of a massive corporate conspiracy.

“I’m not in any hurry to get there,” the older man says, finally. “’Cause let me tell you, boy, I’m too much of an ornery bastard to be killed by something like zombies. A fucker like me only dies when he runs out of places to go.”

* * * * *

There is a period of uncertainty the next morning. 

Columbus is reportedly little more than a smear of ash on the face of Ohio; Tallahassee seems to be choosing _now_, of all times, to be evasive about his preferences; the women are strangely emphatic about their desire to avoid going home. _Ever._

“I feel like we need to give some serious thought to our next step.” Columbus stabs at the open atlas in earnest admonishment. “We can’t just keep gallivanting around the continent as if we are in some sort of apocalyptic playland.”

So, of course, they go to Vegas.

* * * * *

“I’m not entirely certain if it was ‘the zombie virus’ or ‘the syphilis’ that got this one.”

Tallahassee nudges the corpse of what had obviously once been an aging tranny prostitute, face animated with a morbid combination of humor and disgust.  Columbus is not entirely certain which repulses him more—the schlong,  the sagging breasts, or the fact that Tallahassee seems to be seriously considering the logistics of teabagging a zombie.

“Well, you know what they say. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Except venereal disease.”

“Hey, hooker zombies.  Do you think there were any necrophiliacs that would have gotten a kick out of this place?”

“Ew, guys.”

“I have only one thing to say,” Talahassee  declares, sighting along the barrel of his rifle as he fires into the cluster of zombies that have tumbled, shrieking, from the doorway of a nearby strip club, “If somebody doesn’t die by massively oversized plastic cock by the time we leave this town, I am going to be sorely disappointed.”

* * * * *

They stay in the Venetian, although Little Rock lobbies staunchly for the Luxor and Caesar’s Palace is a close call.

Columbus remains somewhat concerned about the logistics of strolling through a colossal hotel complex that could, conceivably, be swarming with hundreds of vicious, cannibalistic, irredeemably patrician zombies, but is forced to concede that they are long overdue for a shopping spree.  (And real beds, Wichita adds.) Tallahassee amuses himself by exterminating the last vestiges of un-life on the first floor as the females traipse through the Palazzo Shoppes in Manolos and Jimmy Choos. Little Rock chooses a turquoise-studded watch for Tallahassee; Columbus argues that it clashes with his ensemble, but Wichita insists that it is dashing, in ‘a rugged sort of way.’

And then Wichita is _beautiful,_ sweeping into the hallway in Prada heels and a ruffled, blue-and-black Dior gown. She smiles at him with uncharacteristic shyness as she pivots slowly, lifting the edges of her skirt to avoid trailing it in the puddles of blood and gore.

Columbus stutters, mouth gaping open and closed like a bewildered fish. Finally: “Can I…would you… the gondolas? With me?”

She manages to rummage up gloves and a parasol, and Columbus wipes his sweaty palms on his slacks before helping her into one of the narrow crafts docked at the southern end of the hotel. It is beyond his wildest dreams—his muscles aching pleasantly as he plies the oar, a beautiful woman reclining at his feet, parasol dipping demurely over her eyes as she presses a scented handkerchief to her face to drown out the stench of stagnant water..

Her mouth quirks wryly as he murmurs _gorgeous, dream, never in a million years_, but her eyes shutter with a terrifying lack of expression when he whispers, longing, _Krysta._

“When I told you that,” she says, quietly, “I didn’t mean that I wanted….I’m not Krysta anymore.”

Ah.

“Sorry,” he says, and means it.

* * * * *

Later, he tells Tallahassee the story as he attempts—and fails—to smoke his first Havana. His face puckers violently around the cigar as he wonders, vaguely, if it is sad that the knowledge that he is in a non-smoking room makes him feel almost rebellious.

Tallahassee merely shakes his head. “Only _you_ could literally be one of the last, functional penises on earth and still manage not to get laid.”

* * * * *

In the beginning, there is the Internet.

Absconding with his roommate’s Sony VAIO—incidentally, this is when Columbus discovers that Rory had harbored some VERY disturbing fetishes—he huddles in any Wi-FI hotspot that looks relatively zombie free, combing cyberspace for any sort of information about a sanctuary from all of this madness. It is only a matter of days before most of the English language publications have stopped updating their sites, and a matter of weeks before the laptop meets its untimely death as an impromptu bludgeon; however, it is enough time for him to discover that the blessing of modern transportation has become a curse. The virus disseminated to every last industrialized country by a fleet of devoted Boeings.

He never admits it to anyone but himself, but it is only after the promise of real safety has eluded him that he begins to long for the familiar, if illusory security of his family.

By the time he meets the sisters and Tallahassee, the vast majority of American servers have grown senile with lack of maintenance. Only the radio remains, each station trundling patiently through an eternal loop of “today’s hottest hits.” Sometimes, however, they stumble upon an abandoned truck or police cruiser, and one of them clambers in and tails grimly behind the Ecalade as Little Rock calls into the receiver: “Is there anyone out there? Hello? Hello? Can someone hear me? 1, 2, 3.”

_Yeah, I’m telling you Waco. Heard they were zombie-free, only place east of the Mississippi. Mayor’s a real hardass. People shot at the first sign of infection. Bodies burned. No one enters, man, no one leaves…_

_Has anyone seen my….Rosalita?  She was….yes, Detroit. If….anyone sees….please, please, please…._

_Hey, hey. Maria, from Las Cruces. If you can hear me, this is Jon. Last night was juicy. If we ever cross paths in the future, let’s do it again….._

_Stop wanking on the airwaves, you sick fuck._

_I met a guy. He said that they’d established a commune, up in the mountains. Self-sustaining, just going to wait this out. He’d only come back to the cities to bring his sister’s family to safety…_

Picked up just outside Wyoming: _Hey folks, this is DJ Armageddon. I know it lookin’ pretty scary out there, but it’s my personal philosophy that if you have to go out, baby, then you should go out singin’. For all of you survivors still plugged into the airwave,  this one’s for you. _

In the cities, the walls screaming with graffiti. Messages scrawled on sidewalks and billboards and buildings—eulogies, helpful tips, warnings to the wise. Too many here, turn back. Gasoline, left, left, right. RIP Jess, little shits finally got you. Canned goods, more than we can carry. At one point, Tallahassee adds his own two cents beneath a blue paint tally of zombies killed, scrawling in looping, grandiose script: 341 and counting. BEAT THAT, BITCHES.

But eventually the day comes when the radio frequencies are silent, buried under gentle drifts of falling static, and all the paint they encounter is faded and old.

* * * * *

Three years after the birth of Zombieland, anno domini, they will meet what will perhaps be the only other human being other that they will ever lay eyes on again.

When Columbus suggests that they take the next exit—because while he can survive a world devoid of refrigeration, microwaves, and lactose-free milk, he _cannot_ endure a world without toilet paper—he is not really expecting to find himself in what appears to be the neighborhood of Vlad the Impaler. He is simultaneously intrigued and revolted by the poles hammered meticulously into the asphalt, each containing a desiccated zombie corpse suspended in various postures of rage and agony. Most have been little more than spitted and left to die, but a few seem to have been molded to an artistic consciousness. For example, the three bodies impaled in front of the gates of the town hall, arrayed with wire in order to resemble a familiar trio of moralizing primates: See no evil. Do no evil. Speak no evil.

“Monkey, monkey, “ Wichita grins, faintly.

 “I am afraid of the man that regularly engages in this sort of activity for entertainment.”

“Fool,” Tallahassee growls sternly, “This man is an _artist_.__”

Sometimes toward evening, they find the man that Tallahassee insists upon referring to as the ‘Da Vinci of Zombieland’, gesticulating wildly with an open bottle as he roars defiantly into a thicket of impaled bodies. Columbus notes that these specimens seem considerably fresher than the others; some of them are even still alive, grasping futilely in the direction of their captor as they squelch around the poles angled through their bodies.

 “WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? GEORGIE’S RIGHT HERE.”  the man screams. He tears open his shirt,  splashes barbecue sauce defiantly over his chest. “FRESH MEAT, LADIES AND GENTS. FRESH MEAT. GET IT WHILE IT’S HOT.

He notices them then, his  eyes clouding with a roil of emotions that Columbus cannot quite identify. Horror. Hope. Hostility. And something edged with such raw and ugly hunger that Columbus finds it difficult to breathe.

“Who are you?” the man whispers, hoarsely.

“Columbus.” His voice is embarrassingly high and thin. “Tallahassee. Wichita. Little Rock.”

“William George Powell. Just Will, now.”

Tallahassee steps forward, clenching his hat humbly in his hands. “Sir, I just had to let you know how much I admire your work.”

“Tallhassee, huh?” Will smiles, cruelly, without humor. “Cute. As if you think you still have somewhere to go.”

* * * * *

Will takes them back to his home, an abandoned Home Depot that he has fortified with plywood and sheet metal.

He has beans, he tells them, and stale Saltines. There are sleeping bags behind the powdered cement. They can sleep on those.

Columbus thanks him for his generosity but remains uneasy, and he knows that something is definitely very, very wrong when he awakens during the night and there is blood, oh god, blood, his blood, everywhere, and he sees Will bending over the terrified women.  Tallahassee is nowhere to be seen and his eyes, Will’s eyes, are yawning open with a dark and terrible sadness.

Fresh meat, he whispers. Get it while it’s hot.

I have to do something, Columbus thinks. But then there is Tallahassee, good ol’, dependable, crazy-as-shit Tallahassee, sporting a goose egg the size of a golf ball and his eyes coldly, deceptively calm. Little Rock whimpers.

“Close your eyes, little girl,” Tallahassee tells her, “This is something you don’t need to see.”

* * * * *

It is something they will never discuss. Whenever they try, the words cloy and tangle in their throats, clotting into accusations that they do not intend to make.

At night, Columbus fingers the scar that spans from shoulder to chest, but does not think it will help him impress any women.

Something feels different about killing a man instead of a zombie, even if the only crime of both is hunger.

* * * * *

They go to Mexico, but it is not home.

The sun is too hot, expanding mercilessly into the sky. The water tastes of a history foreign and incomprehensible, and the cities brim with ghosts that are not their own.  They cannot read the street signs and this troubles them, somehow, even though they know that there are no longer any laws that matter. Wichita burns a deep, alien shade of brown and she shears her hair into style that makes her look too vulnerable and too young.

They trudge back across the border in early June, and Tallahassee kneels at the border and reverently kisses the ground.

* * * * *

While Columbus never ceases to allege that Tallahassee’s quest for the Last of the Holy Sponge Cakes was, in fact, a bit on the extreme side, he is forced to admit that it pales dramatically in comparison to the sheer urgency of Wichita’s search for the world’s few remaining tubes of viable mascara. 

Rite-Aid. Walgreens. CVS. Innumerable Walmarts, derelict temples to dead American gods. (Glory be eternally unto the dollar, alleluia, amen.)

In Chicago, he leaves Little Rock and Tallahassee whooping and racing shopping carts in the parking lot –-if civilization ever recovers, they assure him, they will start their own league—and follows Wichita into the bowels of a dilapidated Target, clutching his shotgun between his knees as he watches her smear crumbling cosmetics onto her face with painstaking fingers. It is a ritual that never ceases to evoke within him an inexplicable sense of awe. There is something that happens to a woman between the liquid foundation and the Triple! Volume! mascara that  elevates her beyond the material plane, transforms her form a fellow mouth-breather into something seductive, elusive, unobtainable.

Apply blush to the apple of the cheek, she murmurs. Blend with gentle, circular strokes toward the hairline.

I have to confess, he tells her, that while I cannot say that I approve of you and Tallahassee and your tendency to put us, _me_, in unnecessary danger, I somehow still admire your insanities, your all-consuming obsessions. When your ambitions necessarily narrow to mere survival, perhaps it is only possible to remain human by focusing on the superfluous. The ‘Twinkies of life, I suppose you could say, the empty frivolities, the ephemeral luxuries. Perhaps I have been too much of a puss to be anything other than strictly rational.

For the smoky look, smudge the eyeliner into the first layer of shadow and use the darkest shade of mascara that you can find. A thousand sins of appearance, she declares, can be obscured by a pair of killer eyes.

 “Seriously.” he says, finally. “Seriously, there might be no one left on the planet but me, your sister, one crazy, balding motherf*cker, and a horde of mindless zombies. Is there a reason that all of this still matters?”

(What he means is:Am _I_ the reason that all of this still matters?.)

 “Fuck! Fuck.” She scrabbles to her feet, pawing with dismay at the dark stain blooming across the thigh of her jeans. Her hair, finally long again, falls raggedly across her face, and he knows her well enough to know when she is avoiding  his eyes.  “And I liked this pair.”

* * * * *

They never make it to Florida (moist, humid, breeds disease), but one morning he wakes up, gazes blearily out of the window, and sees Tallahassee scratching his balls and pissing onto the base of a scorched and pitted sign: “—lcome to Columbus. Enjoy your stay.”

Once the other man has clambered back into the driver’s seat, Columbus hands him a half-empty bottle of hand sanitizer and says: What the fuck?

You can’t run from it forever, Tallahassee grunts, and there is no argument that will budge him.

Driving past the mass grave gaping in the soccer field of his old elementary school. Swerving around the crumbling  blockade on Grandview. Poking through the pitted remains of the grocery where he had once bought dime-and-quarter jawbreakers, digging for salvageable canned and dehydrated goods. Firing on a zombie that may very well have been someone he had once gone to school with. (Actually, that one might not have been so bad.)

And then, inevitably, he is on the doorstep of old house on 5th and Elmwood, and he knows that it has been a long, long time since anyone has been inside.

Wichita finds him standing in the middle of his parents’ bedroom, his hands plunged into his pockets as he stares at the towering stacks of mystery novels and empty styrofoam containers. “I want to...grieve, I think. For something. Something vast and raw and aching, but I don’t even know what.”

“I know, “ she says.

And when his shoulders hunch and shudder, she folds her hands and fails to notice.

* * * * *

His hands shake, but he takes a distant pride in the fact that his voice remains strong and even. “Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord. May he rest in peace.”

“Amen,” say the others, and Tallahassee prostrates himself on the hood of his faithful Caddy and weeps like a child.

* * * * *

_Icy fingers slithering beneath his sweater._

“HOLY HELL, WOMAN. YOUR HANDS ARE FUCKING FREEZING!”

 “Shh, just shut up for a minute, okay? It’s just until my fingers thaw.  ‘M so cold, don’t even think I can grasp the key.

_Mollified by the sensation of her palms flattening slowly against his abdomen._

“Tell me about it. I’m so cold I’m not even sure I still _have_ fingers anymore.”

“Gawd, you’re such a pussy. Learn to bitch like a man. I. Am. So. Cold. That I think mah balls have crawled up into my ass to keep warm.”

“Gross! Gross, gross, gross.”

_Fingers skimming the warm skin of ribs and belly,  knotting restlessly beneath his sternum._

“Hey. Thems the facts of life, skank.”

“Geez, Tal, shaddup already. She’s just a kid.”

“Have to learn about the birds and the bees sometime.”

“Why? It’s not like she’ll be able to use the knowledge. Unless one of you fine gentleman are volunteering.”

“No way! She doesn’t even have tits yet.”

“I refuse to listening to this. La freaking la.”

_Her body pressed against his back, trembling with silent laughter._

* * * *

Despite his good-natured griping and to Columbus’s infinite disgust, Tallahassee actually seems to thrive in the inclement weather. His eyes are bright with the challenge as he leans into the wind and the snow with a grin, his only concessions to winter a scarf and a knit beanie perched jauntily beneath his hat. “Now this is weather a man can wrassle with.”

But neither World of Warcraft or a life of petty crime have proved to be particularly effective preparation for a world devoid of central heating, and with a vote of three to one it is decided that they will be returning to more temperate climes.

* * * * *

Columbus wonders if he is the only one who can feel his heart drain into his stomach with a throbbing, sickening finality as he glimpses the pale letters splayed brazenly across the face of the mountains. The car is silent save for the drone of the engine, but Columbus can sense Little Rock’s lips curving soundlessly around each letter. H-O-L-L-Y-W-O—

It has been four years, but it isn’t until this moment that he discovers how much he has wanted to avoid returning here. Avoid the act of ‘returning’ altogether. They have not been to Canada, and they had managed to miss a smattering of the mideastern states, but it suddenly seems as if they have run out of destinations. They have been running, he realizes, from novelty to novelty, but the time was fast approaching that they would be forced to square their shoulders, plant their feet, and say: Here. For better or for worse.

Tallahassee purses his lips, tapping the surface of the crinkled tourist’s guide that spread across his knees. “Which of these rich bastards do you think was the most likely to have the kind of liquor that could knock your socks off? I don’t know about you, but I could use me a stiff drink.”

* * * * *

_I left her once_, she slurs.  _He said he loved me and he would take me far away, where Daddy could never find me, and I sneaked out and climbed into his backseat after everyone had fallen asleep._

He is never quite certain how to explain it, but there is something painfully, achingly beautiful about Wichita when she has been drinking. And he does not mean that that in the ‘Girls Gone Wild' sort of way.  After a few shots, _something_ seems to kindle within her, a sly, luminous, inexplicably voluptuous quality that seems to leave afterimages of heat on everything she touches. Even now, when she’s starting to sniffle quietly into her cups, all he wants to do is reach over and trace the bow of her lips with his thumb.

_It didn’t work out, obviously. And I went home because even if it was hell, at least it was a hell I knew. _Her fingers tightening around the glass. _She was angry, of course she was angry, but she still she said, ‘I missed you.’_

Drink, she suddenly commands, thrusting the bottle in his direction. It’s not fair that I should be the only one.

And even though Columbus has never liked alcohol—the streak of heat from throat to belly, the restless warmth percolating under his skin—he pours himself a shot and knocks it back with a grimace, the astringent taste bitter on his tongue.

_That’s when I realized that she was the only one who couldn’t leave me. Even if she hated me, even if she tried to ignore me, she was still my sister, and that bond would cut deeper into her skin the farther she tried to go. And I promised her that the next time I left, I would take her with me. _Fiercely._ There would be no one else in the world but her. Nothing else would matter._

Not even me, Columbus says, gently, and sets down his shot glass with a care that would have been comical if it had not been very, very sad. Give me the bottle, Wichita, I think I’m going to need it.

* * * * *

On the balcony, he closes his eyes and let his thoughts bleed into the night and faceless silence, mentally allowing himself to reach for the only three people that he has ever cared about—loud, crazy, selfish, manipulative as they might be. Wichita, legs slung over the arm of a gaudy, chintz couch as she sleeps. Little Rock turning slowly in front of a mirror, smoothing her hands over her borrowed feathers as she contemplates the lines of her child’s body as it is beginning to swell and soften into a woman’s curves. Dimly, somewhere, Tallahassee carefully sharpening each blade as he grimly and steadily drinks back the memories of baby laughter and syrup-sticky palms.

Here, he thinks. It might not be much, but it’s all I’ve got.

The screen door opens quietly behind him, bare feet whispering against the concrete floor. He does not turn as Wichita drapes herself around him, her breath smelling of hazy, absinthe dreams.

_But you came back,_ she says. __

* * * * *

“A boat.”

“Yes.”

“Seriously.”

“Well, think about it. Maybe there were other places that weren’t hit so hard. Some of the island nations. Japan.. Australia, maybe.”

“We’re going to make some fucking ark and go sailing into the wild blue yonder, looking for some goddamn imaginary promised land.”

“I designate you navigator,” Tallahassee says, with the air of bestowing a great honor. “But I want to be the captain.”

**Author's Note:**

> I feel I must apologize to my Yuletide recipient. I am fail at teh humorz, and in my attempts to weave comedy into what was essentially a tale of angst, I somehow scribbled out this 4,000 word monstrosity. I also appear to be incapable of writing in lengthy paragraphs. However, Merry Christmas, and I hope you enjoy it for what it was worth.


End file.
